Good Taste

Abbas Kiarostami at the HFA

I'm pleased to report inklings of an art-movie renaissance in Boston-area filmgoing: recently, a number of esoteric revivals and retrospectives have found receptive audiences. Among recent surprise box-office hits: Contempt and other Godards at the Brattle, Lars von Trier's The Element of Crime and Satyajit Ray's Days and Nights in the Forest at the Harvard Film Archive, the John Cassavetes series at the Coolidge Corner, and the Mohsen Makhmalbaf series at the MFA.

Most exciting to me is that Iranian cinema, after a hard push by critics, finally is catching on with local filmgoers. Following on the MFA retrospective of Gabbeh's Makhmalbaf, the Harvard Film Archive did spectacularly well showing four films of Makhmalbaf's compatriot, Abbas Kiarostami. As unlikely as it may be, the 57-year-old Kiarostami is a new superstar director of international cinema, up there with Trier, Zhang Yimou, and Mike Leigh.

You'll get a final chance to see a Kiarostami work at the Harvard Film Archive this Saturday. There's a special 2 p.m. screening of The Taste of Cherries, which shared the 1997 Grand Prix at Cannes.

How is it possible for Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf to make brilliant, personal, uncompromised films in post-Khomeini Iran?

"Every time I go to a foreign country, the first question is always about censorship," Kiarostami said at an August press conference I attended at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. "If I say there is no censorship in Iran, I'd be lying. But most important is how filmmakers are dealing with it. If you don't accuse me of being pro-censorship, I will tell you that everything has worked for the benefit of the filmmakers. I have an architect friend who says that his best work isn't on flat land but on difficult mountains."

All of his films have played theatrically in Iran. Kiarostami pointed out the irony that the only film of his to secure American distribution, Through the Olive Trees (1994), was never released theatrically in the US by Miramax. Economic censorship instead of political censorship?

"When Miramax bought Through the Olive Trees, I was so glad it would make it in the US, not realizing they bought it as a package with two other films. I regret because of the profit-making motive that a film that could have been a bridge between the US and my country was eliminated. In America, capital is capital, money is money, and small films are small films. That's a fact."

How did Kiarostami feel when The Taste of Cherries won at Cannes? "When I got the prize, I said, `Unbelievable.' Cannes has a reputation for commercial winners, so I was shocked, and the critics in Iran were overwhelmed. I was happy twice: once, for my film, and second, for all independent cinema."

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Poland'S Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa), director of the Jennifer Jason Leigh-starring Washington Square, agrees that the vogue for Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove) is prompted at the top by greed for the box-office receipts of Jane Austen adaptations. "Studio execs are going to the next author, hoping for big successes, though James's storm is much darker," Holland said at the recent Toronto International Film Festival.

But Holland has a more interesting theory for Henry James chic in the 1990s: "His main subject was the relationship of money and character, the way human destinies are shaped by money. When I lived in Communist Poland, I thought his novels were boring, that James was an old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon guy. But I started to find him interesting starting 16 years ago, when I got involved with money!

"In Washington Square, the heroine, Catharine, is emancipated when, reading her father's will, she realizes that money isn't her problem. But this isn't some flamboyant feminist statement: `She's poor and alone, and now she's happy!' Life is much more complicated. I have always had a love/hate relationship with money. I'm not fighting with Hollywood: I like the possibility of good money to make films, which then are distributed."

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The Nonesuch Film Music Series is an exemplary attempt to introduce the scores of world-class film composers to the American public. Nonesuch has released four CDs simultaneously, featuring the music of American composers Alex North and Leonard Rosenman, France's Georges Delerue, and Japan's Toru Takemitsu. The CDs feature excellent liner notes by film scholars; the music is confined to "cues," what actually appears in the movies.

The Delerue CD is the most enjoyable listen, focusing on his heartbreaking, lyrical melodies for the films of François Truffaut, including the classic Jules and Jim score. The North and Rosenman CDs feature their cacophonous, post-Aaron Copland modernism attached to many '50s films. I love especially North's crazy hyper-Freudian title work for The Bad Seed and Rosenman's touching, gently romantic themes for East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, which evoke his off-screen pal James Dean.

Takemitsu is the least known of the composers in America, but he's a giant who completed 93 film scores, including Woman in the Dunes and major work for Kurosawa. Fortunately, he helped put together this CD of his very best compositions last year just before his death.